Part 12 (2/2)

It is an infamy.

You would think twice before you touched a weasel on a fence as it lifts its straight white throat.

Your hand would not be so flig and easy.

Nor the adder we saw asleep with her head on her shoulder, curled up in the suns.h.i.+ne like a princess; when she lifted her head in delicate, startled wonder you did not stretch forward to caress her though she looked rarely beautiful and a miracle as she glided delicately away, with such dignity.

And the young bull in the field, with his wrinkled, sad face, you are afraid if he rises to his feet, though he is all wistful and pathetic, like a mono- lith, arrested, static.

”Is there nothing in me to make you hesitate?

I tell you there is all these.

And why should you overlook them in me?--”

_NEW HEAVEN AND EARTH_

I

AND so I cross into another world shyly and in homage linger for an invitation from this unknown that I would trespa.s.s on.

I am very glad, and all alone in the world, all alone, and very glad, in a new world where I am disembarked at last.

I could cry with joy, because I am in the new world, just ventured in.

I could cry with joy, and quite freely, there is n.o.body to know.

And whosoever the unknown people of this un- known world may be they will never understand my weeping for joy to be adventuring among them because it will still be a gesture of the old world I am making which they will not understand, because it is quite, quite foreign to them.

II

I WAS so weary of the world I was so sick of it everything was tainted with myself, skies, trees, flowers, birds, water, people, houses, streets, vehicles, machines, nations, armies, war, peace-talking, work, recreation, governing, anarchy, it was all tainted with myself, I knew it all to start with because it was all myself.

When I gathered flowers, I knew it was myself plucking my own flowering.

When I went in a train, I knew it was myself travelling by my own invention.

When I heard the cannon of the war, I listened with my own ears to my own destruction.

When I saw the torn dead, I knew it was my own torn dead body.

It was all me, I had done it all in my own flesh.

III

I SHALL never forget the maniacal horror of it all in the end when everything was me, I knew it all already, I antic.i.p.ated it all in my soul because I was the author and the result I was the G.o.d and the creation at once; creator, I looked at my creation; created, I looked at myself, the creator: it was a maniacal horror in the end.

I was a lover, I kissed the woman I loved, and G.o.d of horror, I was kissing also myself.

I was a father and a begetter of children, and oh, oh horror, I was begetting and conceiving in my own body.

IV

AT last came death, sufficiency of death, and that at last relieved me, I died.

I buried my beloved; it was good, I buried myself and was gone.

War came, and every hand raised to murder; very good, very good, every hand raised to murder!

Very good, very good, I am a murderer!

It is good, I can murder and murder, and see them fall the mutilated, horror-struck youths, a mult.i.tude one on another, and then in cl.u.s.ters together smashed, all oozing with blood, and burned in heaps going up in a foetid smoke to get rid of them the murdered bodies of youths and men in heaps and heaps and heaps and horrible reeking heaps till it is almost enough, till I am reduced perhaps; thousands and thousands of gaping, hideous foul dead that are youths and men and me being burned with oil, and consumed in corrupt thick smoke, that rolls and taints and blackens the sky, till at last it is dark, dark as night, or death, or h.e.l.l and I am dead, and trodden to nought in the smoke-sodden tomb; dead and trodden to nought in the sour black earth of the tomb; dead and trodden to nought, trodden to nought.

V

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